With that said, I would not be at all surprised to find that listeners and players THINK that a particular instrument sounds better when they think that the instrument is a better instrument (that's why the $1000 optical digital cable makes your sound system sound so much better). That's why the double blind is needed in order to tell which instrument in fact sounds better.
If it takes a couple of days (or longer) to become familiar enough with an instrument to get the best out of it, that does present challenges in the blinding.
My favorite among the high end snake oil was the $500 power cable, as if the electrons that had traveled over miles industrial grade conductors would notice a meter of fancy conductor between the wall and the amp. Dunlavy did a lot of double blind tests on speaker wire and consistently demonstrated that listeners couldn't tell the difference between twelve gauge commodity grade stranded wire and hundred dollar a foot speaker cable. That being said I remain of the opinion that the performers needed to play each of those instruments for hours or even days before choosing. Twenty minutes isn't long enough to finish a set of practice exercises. YoYo Ma has said of the Strad he plays (The Davidoff Strad once owned by DuPree IIRC) that he has to coax the sound from it. Learning how to coax sound from a temperamental instrument can take weeks of practice.
It is very easy to put a fake label inside an instrument.... Facts to remember are:
Statistically, most violins have a fake Stradivari label inside.
Of those that don’t, most have a different name, but will still be fake.
Few violin experts know much about printing or manuscripts.
Read W. Henry Hill for some of the details. I've read much of this from various sources. The so called fake Strads were originally produced by luthiers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who had an opportunity to closely inspect an authentic Strad. They made detailed drawings and a set of molds. The instruments they produced were never intended as anything but a faithful copy of a Strad in an effort to reproduce the Stradivari magic. Success would mean the world of music beating a path to your shop and many of these are finely crafted instruments. Years later scammers would attach forged Stradivari labels to these violins and pass them off as genuine.
I suspect this test detected an absence of virtuoso talent. Performers like DuPree, Heifetz, Menuhin and Stern could coax something from a Strad that isn't available from a lesser instrument. The other issue is the constraints that limited their playing time on each instrument. I suspect they would be able to tell the difference between the instruments after several days of practice on each instrument but such a test would be impractical.
The hand crafting of fine violins often involves a master, journeymen and apprentices. Once crafted and approved the master applies his label to the instrument but the violin may have been made by a journeyman to the master's standards. Journeymen can become masters in their own right and apprentices become journeymen. It's possible for one shop to have several journeymen of varying experience over the years. After the instrument is sold and used it can require service. The bridges get broken, the peg holes wear, the neck might have to be reset so additional luthiers may have worked on the instrument. This is one way that labels can end up being disputed.
A whinging rant that claims JFGI is part of the readers job description is hardly an ass whooping. I reject that assertion and assert that the author who wrote "Studies show" should JFGI. TFA in that same post was infotainment at the Daily Mail, a source that has been excoriated here in the past. I agree that the system is broken but that post didn't offer anything more than a troll for eyeballs and advertising revenue that the eyeballs attract.
It's an excellent proof of concept. How much of an IPad can we do for one tenth the price of an IPad? There's a lot of whinging on the net about bloated software and overpriced gadgets yet all too often we react with disdain when someone delivers a low priced example without the bloat. There could be a market for a billion cheap tablet computers in India and China alone. Hopefully other designers will follow suit and ask "How much of an IPad can we do for one fourth the price? Perhaps HP should have asked that question a couple of years ago.
I worked for a Bay Area startup for a number of years. It was started by three people who respectively brought money, ideas and brains to the table. The money man had a sign on his desk that read "Overhead is not a career opportunity." So I have worked for one venture capitalist, although an unusual one who ran the company.
Silicon Valley and other islands of technology define their economic model by success in the marketplace, not by the manipulations of ivy league finance wizards.
I find nonfiction more engaging these days. Zero, The Biography of a Dangerous Idea was outstanding both times I've read it. Not Even Wrong shows promise as does The Trouble with Physics.This is Your Brain on Music has sat unopened on my bookshelf for far too long. If you prefer fiction look at Twain and Dickens. They're widely available and you can get the Cliff's notes. If you want something unusual get Canterbury Tales by Chaucer (Cliff's Notes are required for most anything this old to help understand the context of the writing. Google "Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog." There's an online glossary.)
An underlying reason for this is to better correlate the map with the objects placed on the map. Accurately place the Pita Place on the map between the Jamba Juice and the Charbucks instead of putting it on the other side of the parking lot where there isn't a building.
I have been reading about the Rare Earth Hypothesis for several years now. Not only does the moon moderate the wobble. The moon slows down rate at which the earth's rotation slows towards tidal lock, the slowing of the planetary rotation until one side of the body faces the body it orbits. Without the moon the Earth could end up like Venus with a very slow rotation or like Uranus with its extreme axial tilt. In the first billion years after the moon was formed it was a lot closer and the earth had a much shorter day. With a twelve hour day you'll get twice as many tides, and with the moon a lot closer those tides could have been hundreds of feet high. A mixing zone where bacteria could evolve, where cyanobacteria could sit in tidal pools under the sun and be mixed with every high tide. The Fermi paradox comes about because the Drake equation predicts some very large numbers. Given the high probability of life predicted by the Drake equation a space faring species would evolve and colonize vast portions of the galaxy in a few million years. Since this hasn't been observed we can conclude that the Drake Equation is incomplete. The equation should be modified to include the following:
A metric that requires a life zone planet to have a large moon.
Number of civilizations predicted by the revised Drake Equation * 1 minus the sum of the following:
Percent extinct due to natural causes (i.e. Extinction level event such as a GRB, supernova, impact etc.) We know these events happen and can wipe out life on a planet.
Percent extinct due to exchange of WMD. (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) It's reasonable to assume that any developing civilization will experience the same kind of political and religious strife we experience here on earth.
TFA lamenting the adult scoring poorly also pointed to black students scoring far below whites. I cannot imagine how a college grad running a large organization scored so poorly on the test unless he's a worthless schmoozer in a designer suit whose executive assistant does everything for him. Is this posturing to dumb down the tests so more students can pass? Make a case that the test is too hard because college grads cannot pass it? The sample questions were not that hard. I got all of them correct before morning coffee. It's easy enough that it would be fair to require every politician to pass the test before running for office.
How is it that a thriving e-commerce company only has one IT employee? Did the rest quit? Did the marketing drones and PHB's bleed the IT budget into their bonus pool? I suspect deeper issues than the physical infrastructure you describe. Bandaids are what someone does when there's no budget to do it right and it sounds like the management culture doesn't want to invest in doing it right.
Back in 1982 the TV I owned died. I did without for a few years and didn't miss it. During that time I read lots of books and high quality magazines such as Parabola and Verbatim. Guests thought I was weird because I would leave back issues on the top of the toilet. I finally bought a small portable in 1986 so I could stop telling people I didn't own a TV. I wonder if the advent of entertainment media in the technological age is why SETI has failed to detect any signals. We are trapped by a vast wasteland of programming that is crap. Otherwise healthy minds zone out and atrophy while sucking on the glass teat. Perhaps alien cultures fell into the same trap. First it was television, then video games, then internet porn, then blogs and more porn and finally pontificating on Order 66 at Wookipedia. If I could do one thing over in my life it would be to get rid of the television when I was in grade school.
Slashdot Mirror
With that said, I would not be at all surprised to find that listeners and players THINK that a particular instrument sounds better when they think that the instrument is a better instrument (that's why the $1000 optical digital cable makes your sound system sound so much better). That's why the double blind is needed in order to tell which instrument in fact sounds better.
If it takes a couple of days (or longer) to become familiar enough with an instrument to get the best out of it, that does present challenges in the blinding.
My favorite among the high end snake oil was the $500 power cable, as if the electrons that had traveled over miles industrial grade conductors would notice a meter of fancy conductor between the wall and the amp. Dunlavy did a lot of double blind tests on speaker wire and consistently demonstrated that listeners couldn't tell the difference between twelve gauge commodity grade stranded wire and hundred dollar a foot speaker cable. That being said I remain of the opinion that the performers needed to play each of those instruments for hours or even days before choosing. Twenty minutes isn't long enough to finish a set of practice exercises. YoYo Ma has said of the Strad he plays (The Davidoff Strad once owned by DuPree IIRC) that he has to coax the sound from it. Learning how to coax sound from a temperamental instrument can take weeks of practice.
It is very easy to put a fake label inside an instrument. ... Facts to remember are :
Statistically, most violins have a fake Stradivari label inside.
Of those that don’t, most have a different name, but will still be fake.
Few violin experts know much about printing or manuscripts.
Not Even Wrong - The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law - by Peter Woit.
Read W. Henry Hill for some of the details. I've read much of this from various sources. The so called fake Strads were originally produced by luthiers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who had an opportunity to closely inspect an authentic Strad. They made detailed drawings and a set of molds. The instruments they produced were never intended as anything but a faithful copy of a Strad in an effort to reproduce the Stradivari magic. Success would mean the world of music beating a path to your shop and many of these are finely crafted instruments. Years later scammers would attach forged Stradivari labels to these violins and pass them off as genuine.
I suspect this test detected an absence of virtuoso talent. Performers like DuPree, Heifetz, Menuhin and Stern could coax something from a Strad that isn't available from a lesser instrument. The other issue is the constraints that limited their playing time on each instrument. I suspect they would be able to tell the difference between the instruments after several days of practice on each instrument but such a test would be impractical.
The hand crafting of fine violins often involves a master, journeymen and apprentices. Once crafted and approved the master applies his label to the instrument but the violin may have been made by a journeyman to the master's standards. Journeymen can become masters in their own right and apprentices become journeymen. It's possible for one shop to have several journeymen of varying experience over the years. After the instrument is sold and used it can require service. The bridges get broken, the peg holes wear, the neck might have to be reset so additional luthiers may have worked on the instrument. This is one way that labels can end up being disputed.
A whinging rant that claims JFGI is part of the readers job description is hardly an ass whooping. I reject that assertion and assert that the author who wrote "Studies show" should JFGI. TFA in that same post was infotainment at the Daily Mail, a source that has been excoriated here in the past. I agree that the system is broken but that post didn't offer anything more than a troll for eyeballs and advertising revenue that the eyeballs attract.
Thank you for establishing that appeal to authority is a valid form of argument on /.
Not only have studies shown that there is no need for such locked down prison facilities
What studies? In which journals were they published and where can I read an abstract?
It's an excellent proof of concept. How much of an IPad can we do for one tenth the price of an IPad? There's a lot of whinging on the net about bloated software and overpriced gadgets yet all too often we react with disdain when someone delivers a low priced example without the bloat. There could be a market for a billion cheap tablet computers in India and China alone. Hopefully other designers will follow suit and ask "How much of an IPad can we do for one fourth the price? Perhaps HP should have asked that question a couple of years ago.
Verbing weirds language.
Not at all. e-meringue failed in the marketplace because of a flawed business model.
I worked for a Bay Area startup for a number of years. It was started by three people who respectively brought money, ideas and brains to the table. The money man had a sign on his desk that read "Overhead is not a career opportunity." So I have worked for one venture capitalist, although an unusual one who ran the company.
Silicon Valley and other islands of technology define their economic model by success in the marketplace, not by the manipulations of ivy league finance wizards.
I found The Fountainhead more accessible. If you haven't read Ayn Rand before start there.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27681
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3172
Lots of old stuff at Project Gutenberg
I find nonfiction more engaging these days. Zero, The Biography of a Dangerous Idea was outstanding both times I've read it. Not Even Wrong shows promise as does The Trouble with Physics. This is Your Brain on Music has sat unopened on my bookshelf for far too long. If you prefer fiction look at Twain and Dickens. They're widely available and you can get the Cliff's notes. If you want something unusual get Canterbury Tales by Chaucer (Cliff's Notes are required for most anything this old to help understand the context of the writing. Google "Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog." There's an online glossary.)
Hey, it has to have a core. Diamonds are forever.
An underlying reason for this is to better correlate the map with the objects placed on the map. Accurately place the Pita Place on the map between the Jamba Juice and the Charbucks instead of putting it on the other side of the parking lot where there isn't a building.
Then we'll have to migrate to "Cutest kitten"
Will this include Chinese political prisoners who are forced to work as defacto slaves?
I have been reading about the Rare Earth Hypothesis for several years now. Not only does the moon moderate the wobble. The moon slows down rate at which the earth's rotation slows towards tidal lock, the slowing of the planetary rotation until one side of the body faces the body it orbits. Without the moon the Earth could end up like Venus with a very slow rotation or like Uranus with its extreme axial tilt. In the first billion years after the moon was formed it was a lot closer and the earth had a much shorter day. With a twelve hour day you'll get twice as many tides, and with the moon a lot closer those tides could have been hundreds of feet high. A mixing zone where bacteria could evolve, where cyanobacteria could sit in tidal pools under the sun and be mixed with every high tide.
The Fermi paradox comes about because the Drake equation predicts some very large numbers. Given the high probability of life predicted by the Drake equation a space faring species would evolve and colonize vast portions of the galaxy in a few million years. Since this hasn't been observed we can conclude that the Drake Equation is incomplete. The equation should be modified to include the following:
A metric that requires a life zone planet to have a large moon.
Number of civilizations predicted by the revised Drake Equation * 1 minus the sum of the following:
Percent extinct due to natural causes (i.e. Extinction level event such as a GRB, supernova, impact etc.) We know these events happen and can wipe out life on a planet.
Percent extinct due to exchange of WMD. (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) It's reasonable to assume that any developing civilization will experience the same kind of political and religious strife we experience here on earth.
TFA lamenting the adult scoring poorly also pointed to black students scoring far below whites. I cannot imagine how a college grad running a large organization scored so poorly on the test unless he's a worthless schmoozer in a designer suit whose executive assistant does everything for him. Is this posturing to dumb down the tests so more students can pass? Make a case that the test is too hard because college grads cannot pass it? The sample questions were not that hard. I got all of them correct before morning coffee. It's easy enough that it would be fair to require every politician to pass the test before running for office.
How is it that a thriving e-commerce company only has one IT employee? Did the rest quit? Did the marketing drones and PHB's bleed the IT budget into their bonus pool? I suspect deeper issues than the physical infrastructure you describe. Bandaids are what someone does when there's no budget to do it right and it sounds like the management culture doesn't want to invest in doing it right.
Back in 1982 the TV I owned died. I did without for a few years and didn't miss it. During that time I read lots of books and high quality magazines such as Parabola and Verbatim. Guests thought I was weird because I would leave back issues on the top of the toilet. I finally bought a small portable in 1986 so I could stop telling people I didn't own a TV. I wonder if the advent of entertainment media in the technological age is why SETI has failed to detect any signals. We are trapped by a vast wasteland of programming that is crap. Otherwise healthy minds zone out and atrophy while sucking on the glass teat. Perhaps alien cultures fell into the same trap. First it was television, then video games, then internet porn, then blogs and more porn and finally pontificating on Order 66 at Wookipedia. If I could do one thing over in my life it would be to get rid of the television when I was in grade school.